Acer thinks that Microsoft is getting it wrong with Surface RT marketing

There's no question that Microsoft's Surface RT tablet has come out of the starting gate a little slowly. Sales have been relatively modest since its late October launch, and Microsoft only recently opened up sales to third-party retailers.

Microsoft already has enough on its plate in dealing with Surface RT -- and the upcoming Surface Pro -- but one of the company’s own hardware partners is looking to rain on its parade. Acer has been a vocal critic of Surface RT from the beginning, and it looks like that criticism isn't letting up anytime soon.

Acer President Jim Wong yesterday stated in an interview with AllThingsD that Microsoft is confusing consumers with its Surface RT advertising. “The promotion of the product is really focused on the keyboard, and the users really don’t know how to maximize the touch experience,” said Wong.

Perhaps Wong is hinting at Microsoft's Surface commercial which seems to place more emphasis on the keyboard cover "clicking" into place and choreographed dancing instead of primarily focusing on the Surface's touch screen and touch-centric Windows RT interface.

Wong also points to the iPad and how touch has always been the focal point of Apple’s marketing of the device to consumers. There are keyboard accessories available for the iPad (some even made by Apple), but they take a backseat to touch.

Acer CMO Michael Birkin piled on by stating that consumers in general are getting mixed messages (which is leading to confusion) regarding the differences between Windows RT and Windows 8.

So do the Acer executives have a point with Surface advertising and Windows RT/Windows 8 confusion, or do you think that Acer feels that its toes are getting stepped on by Microsoft encroaching into the hardware realm?

that map is woefully incomplete. It does not even touch on their business product lines. There is also no mention of the products MS makes for other platforms. That map could be way more convoluted.

Mapping MS out like that is the wrong way of doing things to begin with. MS is a company of several technologies, which they bundle into different products. For example; Skydrive is simply skydrive. You can interact with skydrive in different ways depending on your use of it and the devices you have. I personally use it as an automated document backup and syncing feature. I moved my documents folder to the skydrive folder on all of my machines and *poof* when I save a document on any computer it becomes available on all of my computers. Similarly, my phone automagically moves everything to skydrive, and *poof* all of my pictures are automagically on all of my systems as a local copy which is updated through skydrive. Skydrive is supposed to be cloud storage, and I could use it like that if I wanted, but I find it more convieniant to use it as a sync tool.

But the point is that Skydrive is merely Windows Live Mesh attached to a HDD on one of MS's servers somewhere. The name may change, and the packaging may change, but what it really is, is simply live mesh, which can run on just about anything, and you can interact with it via just about anything. Categorizing it (or other technologies like Skype) as different things under different divisions just muddies the waters.